At the Worldwide Partner Conference 2014 Cisco and Microsoft announced a multi-year sales and go-to-market agreement designed to modernize data centers through the delivery and acceleration of integrated solutions. This will focus on bringing a deeper integration between the datacenter technologies of both companies. This includes Cisco UCS and Nexus products as well as Microsoft’s CloudOS solutions based Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center, SQL Server and Microsoft Azure.

Highlights:

Go-to-Market:

Cisco and Microsoft agree to a three-year go-to-market plan focused on transforming data centers through the delivery of integrated solutions for enterprise customers and service providers.

In year one, the companies will focus on six countries — the United States, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Australia — with expansion to additional countries in the following years.

Cisco and Microsoft sales teams will work together on cloud and data center opportunities, including an initial program focused on the migration of Windows 2003 customers to Windows 2012 R2 on the Cisco UCS platform.

As you may know I am a Microsoft MVP and a Cisco Champion and I really like doing project with Cisco Hardware since they do a lot of integration with the Microsoft Stack especially System Center and PowerShell. In my opinion this could be a strong partnership and will make life of a lot of people a lot easier.

Together with Savision I worked on a whitepaper about System Center Virtual Machine Manager Fabric Management and Resource Pooling. After the whitepaper was released I also did two webinars where I presented the information from the whitepaper about Fabric and Cloud Management with Virtual Machine Manager.

One of the most challenging things during the shift to Cloud Computing is to manage Fabric Resources efficiently. Together with Savision I have worked on a whitepaper in which it is outlined how Fabric resource like Compute, Storage and Network can be managed efficiently and how System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides a solution to build a datacenter abstraction layer.

The whitepaper is focused on building a datacenter abstraction layer of your fabric resources, self-service and service deployment. If you would like to know more about it, join our webinar.

As you may know I do a lot of work around Hyper-V, System Center and Windows Azure Pack. One of the most critical parts of the Microsoft Cloud is System Center Virtual Machine Manager. VMM is the component where mostly everything comes together in some way. From the Fabric resource such as Storage, Compute and Networking up to the Virtual Machines and Services running on top of the Fabric layer. Virtual Machine Manager basically allows you to pool resources and offer them to tenants which can than deploy services and virtual machines to the pools.

This means VMM manages not only your Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Manager also manages your network environment, your storage and a lot more. So wouldn’t it be great to use the data Virtual Machine Manager collects to review your environment and get some tips you can optimize it? This is exactly what Savision did with their Virtual Machine Manager Add-in called Cloud Advisor which includes tuning and optimization recommendations.

Savision’s Cloud Advisor looks for problems like:

“Virtual Machine Appears to be Unused”

“Prediction: All Available Memory Will Be Consumed By…”

“Virtual Guest Services Are Not Installed”

“Starting Memory Is Too High”

“Low Disk Space On Cluster Shared Volume”

“Dynamic Memory is not enabled”

and a lot more…

Most of you will think okay, this sounds great but how much will this thing cost. Well that’s the great part, the Savision Cloud Advisor for System Center Virtual Machine Manager is absolutely free. So there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t deploy the Savision Cloud Advisor in your Virtual Machine Manager environment.

In March and April I will present together with Microsoft and itnetx in webinars about the Microsoft Cloud OS. The webinars will be free and will cover an overview about the Microsoft Cloud OS. The Microsoft Cloud OS is the story behind the latest releases of Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V System Center, Windows Azure Pack and Windows Azure. The webinar series will be split in three different sessions and will cover how you can plan, build and operate a Microsoft Cloud and how you can bring the Private & Public Cloud together to make use of a Hybrid Cloud model.

In the past months I did several blog posts about Hyper-V over SMB and Storage Spaces. In small environment management of such a Scale-Out File Server Cluster can be a simple thing because you don’t have a lot of changes, you setup the thing once and this will work for some time. In larger enterprise fabric and storage management is a huge topic, now with Hyper-V over SMB you don’t have to do any zoning or configure iSCSI initiators but you still have to set the right permission on the file share. This is where System Center Virtual Machine Manager comes into play.

Virtual Machine Manager also you to not only manage your iSCSI or fiber channel storage appliances via SMI-S, you can also manage your Scale-Out File Server.

First you have to add the Scale-Out File Server to the SCVMM fabric management. You can simple add a resource and Add a Storage Device. This will open a wizard where you can not only select SAN or NAS storage, but you can also select Widows-based file server.

Enter the FQDN of your Fileserver Cluster

This will scan your File Server Cluster and will show you already existing file shares. You can now match Storage Classifications with the existing file shares.

After you have connected your Scale-Out File Server you can now create new File Shares and Storage Spaces directly from the Virtual Machine Manager Console.

After you have created the file share you now have to add the permission for the Hyper-V host to the File Share. Virtual Machine Manager does automatically take care of that if you add the File Share to the Hyper-V Host or if you have a Hyper-V Cluster to the Cluster Object.

Now you can start using the file shares for placing Virtual Machines on it. The File Shares classifications will also be available in the VM Clouds.

As you can see, System Center Virtual Machine Manager can make your life a lot easier and helps you manage your whole datacenter fabric, from Compute, network up to storage. In 2013 I did several presentations on Fabric Management with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and two of them are online. You should check out the following posts:

From 11. to 12. November the first Microsoft Germany TechNet Conference 2013 took place in Berlin, Germany. I had the chance to present a session about Virtualization Fabric Management with System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager and Hyper-V. There were also some other great session from other Microsoft MVPs like Carsten Rachfahl, Aidan Finn, Maarten Goet, Daniel Neumann, Damian Flynn, Benedict Berger and many more. At this time thanks to Microsoft Germany for this great event and the opportunity to talk at this event.

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About

My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server. Opinions are my own.